CALCUTTA, March 25: The Nobel medal of Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel laureate, was stolen from a museum in eastern India, police said on Thursday.

The medal and other belongings of Tagore had vanished when the museum at Visva Bharati University in Shanti Niketan, 200 kilometres north of Calcutta, reopened on Thursday after a two-day break, police said.

"Tagore's Nobel medal, his watch, other gold medals and some rare artefacts and paintings have been stolen from the museum," West Bengal state police inspector Chayan Mukherjee told AFP.

Tagore, an icon of India's independence struggle who wrote the country's national anthem, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. He founded the Visva Bharati University in 1901 in a bid to connect learning with nature.

Visva Bharati spokesman Amitava Chowdhury said the university was taking stock of its Tagore collection and had indefinitely closed the museum to visitors. -AFP